


Become The Flowers

by sallydewitts



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cancer, Family, Family Drama, Family Member Death, Gen, Memoirs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-15
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-23 01:02:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3749215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallydewitts/pseuds/sallydewitts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short story about the loss of an important loved one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> This was an assignment for English class I really liked. Will try to return to Coquettish soon.

     When I was born, I only had one grandmother.

     That sentence might make it seem like one had died, but when I was brought into the world on a January 8th in 1997, there was only one grandparent that was present. Three out of four of my parents’ parents were alive and well. The last one had died of natural causes well before I arrived, but he was abusive, and a drinker, and was therefore mourned minimally by either side of the family- especially true for my fathers side, from which he came. Instead, Iris- the mother of my father- was the first to see me, as tiny and slightly blue as I was (I had been born with a nuchal cord) and, even then, her fingers were slightly crooked with the advance of her arthritis when she pulled the hospital blanket away from my face. “What a precious baby girl,” she breathed, and our fates were sealed.

     From that day, I thought I had only one grandparent, all to myself, and forgot that the other half of my family was what felt like eons away in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic. As far as I was concerned in my childish mindset, the remaining two grandparents were already cooling in their graves.

That was the verdict, and it remained unchallenged for the next 13 years.

    My grandmother was a wonderful woman, and even as her age- and joint pain- advanced, I was allowed and encouraged to stay overnight, helping her clean house when I arrived in the afternoon and watching tv after breakfast the next morning. Like clockwork, her sister- Ellie- would be there, too, and I would watch them cook breakfast with a the practiced and graceful ease of two life-long chefs. It was mostly hybridized spanish-american food, with revuelto de bacalao (codfish with scrambled eggs) alongside regular smoked American bacon, cooked almost side by side in the small, cubby-like kitchen. Save for the carpets sprinkled liberally about, the floors were smooth: hard linoleum, a light grey, with a frictionless texture that let me slide down the main and single hallway like my socks were rollerblades- though I worried occasionally she would fall from the same smoothness. It was fun, wider than her old apartment and airy, though I secretly missed the historical and vintage feel her last apartment had held. She’d moved there in 2007, to the other side of the neighborhood she’d lived in for nearly 40 years.

**-**

She started getting sick in late 2008. I was 13.

 


	2. The Middle

While she had had health issues almost her entire life (arthritis), my grandmother's illness jump-started that year, and multiplied, with a vengeance that hurt my heart. First, the sores on her foot, brought on by a poorly done bone biopsy, became infected and spread, leaving diseased spots like burn wounds the size of my fingernail in their wake. She stopped taking off her slippers around me, though the occasional flash of infected skin, peeking from between bandages and sock, struck me silent. Then, her joint pain started racking her, more often and stronger then before, and I stopped being allowed to visit overnight, though I was allowed to stay at noon. A few weeks after, she was whisked to the hospital. I visited her with my father whenever I could, following her referrals from medical center to medical center until the generic whiteness, identical tiling and hyper-cleanliness of the nurses all melted into one big hospital limbo, where if felt like my grandmother was on every floor but we could never find her door. It reminded me of a labyrinth of sickly people- always revolving, never still, and every time I visited I needed new directions to find my way. While she was mostly lucid, she would have her moments of strangeness- she asked for scissors for weeks on end, even after she had been given pair after pair by my aunt and dad. I never actually found out what she wanted them for, but even that was of little importance compared to the one time my father and her disagreed, her from her sickbed and him from the doorway of her room.


	3. The Decline

     “I want to die.” She had said clearly, reclining with closed eyes, an oxygen tube around her face and an IV ignobly stabbing her thin arm. I couldn’t see my father’s face, ahead of him as I was, but just as I recoiled from her words, he bustled up behind me and wrapped his hand around my forearm, determined. “You can’t say that,” he said harshly, pulling up a chair in the room and guiding me to it. “I’m in pain. I do.” she said quietly, still not looking at either of us. “Rachel is here. Your granddaughter. Can you have her hear you say that- Do you really mean it? Prove it.” Roughly, he pushed my chair closer to the bed and waited, his hands trembling imperceptibly. She looked at me, tired eyes framed by graying copper hair and a thin face, and closed her eyes.

    “Paul, please.”

   “Please, **nothing**. I want you to only say _that_ if you mean it.”

   Helplessly, I sat between them, torn between the rising horror of waiting for her answer and the free-floating dread of actually being curious.

   Behind me, my father started pacing the tiny span of the room, sneakers making a faint squeak every time his foot came down. “She can’t mean that.” he mumbled, still moving restlessly. Noticing the quiet between us, he glared at his mother, stopping his pacing so rigidly he looked like a robot, or a mannequin. “You really mean it, say it to _her_.”  

   My grandmother looked at me, curled in the chair with a shell-shocked expression, dark curls framing eyes slowly but surely clouding with tears. She sighed.

   “I love you.” she told me, and I must have gotten up or my father had intervened, because suddenly I was standing outside the hospital room, staring at the nurses station, with my grandmothers’ door at my back. A few minutes- or was it seconds?- later, he stormed out, reaching for my hand and guiding me back down the elevator and out the door we had came through. “We’re going home,” he said bluntly, a tad unnecessarily since we were already nearing the train to take us back. I took his hand and followed quietly, a ghost of a daughter, and pretended not to notice how teary his eyes looked.


End file.
